Tuesday, January 24, 2017

It's been really hard being out of our house the past month (a month already?!) and progress has been slow lately so I am keeping my eye on the prize and planning for the future. I have really kept myself busy thinking about new furniture, paint colors and design elements to keep myself distracted from the fact that nothing is happening.

We are doing some redesigning of the space and getting rid of the fireplace altogether. Instead we will have a door and lots of windows on that wall and it will open up to a patio space that will connect with our new deck. Of course our front wall we will keep all windows, it's what made us fall in love with the house to begin with!

The loft stairs are being replaced with a spiral staircase and since we get the chance to repaint I am obsessing over picking the new color for the living room, dining room and loft space. It's such a big continuous area that I still want to go neutral, right now I'm leaning towards this Mocha Ice color. We will have cedar trim and are talking about going with a slightly darker color for the floors as well.

We have been looking around at a ton of furniture and are seeing a lot we like at World Market. We are leaning towards this blue velvet sofa with some leather and graphic accent chairs and end tables that double as laptop desks. Throw in some graphic pillows for punch and we have a good idea of where we want to go with this room.

While it's depressing how slowly things are moving with the rebuild it's fun to think ahead and plan for when we get to do the exciting parts like rebuild, pick paint colors and go furniture shopping. I'll do some more posts on plans for the other rooms in the near future :-)

Saturday, January 7, 2017

Aside from the fire it was a nice December with lots of fun holiday activities. We went away to the mountains for Christmas to Unicoi State parks and it was a really nice little escape. Here's some photos of what we were up to last month.

If you know us at all you know that we had a house fire just before Christmas. I honestly don't even want to write about it here because I have told the story so many times now but since I started this as house blog and it has evolved into a blog about everything that means home to me I know the fire deserves an entry. It was a chimney fire that started on a Sunday night (get your fireplaces cleaned and inspected people!) and thankfully all people and pets made it out of the house just fine.

Now we begin the slow process of rebuilding, tearing down the old and putting in new. The hardest part of this for me is that our house was such a labor of love. We put so many hours into this house, working towards making it better over the years, doing so much with our own hands and the hands of friends and family. It's hard to see all that burnt away.

I'm realizing through all of this how tied to my home I am. It is such a huge part of me, I put so much into it and it's so hard to be away from my home. I'm very fortunate that I get to spend this time at my other home however, the home I grew up in. I can't explain what a comforting feeling it was to be able to go to my parents house after the fire and they are kind enough to put us up until our house is rebuilt.

So this will be the only mopey, emotional post about the fire. From here on it will be all about rebuilding and plans to improve the house. We have a lot of ideas and the bright side of this is that we are finally getting a huge chunk of what we want done to the house knocked out. When all this is done the house will be amazing with all new flooring, walls, windows and much more. It almost feels like we are having a house built from scratch to our specifications. For now we are keeping the end goals in mind and moving onward and upward. Here's to a speedy recovery and better luck in 2017!